This is the Voice of Freedom broadcasting from somewhere in MagyarorszÃg.

I'm exhausted - should have never gotten the CBS NCAA tourney feed working at home. Slept 2 hours this morning. Fly to Moscow Wed a.m. dark and early. Life is hectic and I just keep looking at April 6th and telling myself I just have to make it that far.

I'm being melodramatic but this next couple weeks will be rough. Last week was superb - I'll post a write up later.

Pax

I havenÂt been here for years!

Whassup?

Picked up my new 13" Retina Macbook Pro ( not the same as a plane Macbook Pro - these guys are so good at marketing.) I've been using it for two weeks. I'm learning.
 
My favorite surprise was when I opened up the terminal app and started trying out commands. Everything was working so I went to see what environment I was in and saw that it was bash. This made me very happy.
 
I think on the gui end it is o.k. I prefer but I'm getting use to the way OS X wants me to do things. I've had to learn some weird gestures to get at what I want quickly.
 
Here are some of the issues so far. Installing software sucks. It comes in different file formats and how it gets done varies wildly based on where I get it from. It's confusing as all get out. Without a package manager I guess updates will be on a per software basis and apparently uninstalling means removing the program and then hunting down any bits it leaves behind. That's pretty idiotic. I had a hard core Mac guy try to explain to me why this was better.
 
There is this gigantic track pad below my keyboard and I wouldn't care if palm detection or whatever you want to call it worked better. As I type this the window is scrolling up and down as my hands periodically bump into the track pad. So far I can't find a setting that lets me try to fix this sorry state of affairs. This is my big issue with the lack of options. If things work correctly it's fine. If they don't, you are just hosed. And it never works correctly as much as the people who make these things think it will.
 
Battery life on all Apple products I've interacted with lately is just flat out impressive. This laptop is no exception.
 
It's the most expensive laptop I've ever owned. That changes my whole approach to how I travel with it. I have to be a lot more careful. I didn't realize how much I appreciated not worrying about my $400 Acer so much. This is more on me I guess but it's still a function of the machine. I do appreciate that full disk encryption is now a part of the OS. This puts it ahead of windows and helps it catch up with Linux a bit.
 
When Mac people are explaining some amazing feature to me that I've been using in KDE for years and years I do chuckle a little inside. Virtual desktops for example.
 
Multimonitor support is weak. It doesn't work as well as it does on my Win 7 machine. I don't think I'm alone in this. When I go to conferences it's a pretty steady stream of guys coming up to present and plugging their machines into the projector. It's the Mac guys that have the most trouble.
 
Speaking of that - my life was increasingly becoming dongle/incompatible power cord free. Apple just set me back quite a few years as I am not back to carrying around a bunch of wire and related junk that all just do one thing for one machine. I am not a fan of that whole mess.
 
It's very early on. I may end up turning into a true believer. Or maybe I'll have better options by the time I'm ready for a new machine. I'd love something with this build quality that ran Fedora well.

The fact that slashboxes have stopped working and I didn't see links for writing journals in the beta has me thinking that the site will move away from the level of personalization that it had before. So I'm thinking through what I'll do as a replacement. The idea I keep coming back to is I may go ahead and use a subreddit as my new journal. It would be a place I could post - people could follow it and respond if they were interested. It's possible to set one up so that people can read and comment but they can't submit posts themselves - basically what the slashdot journal is.

That seems the easiest. I have my blog too - but I've always liked having a 'spot' that is part of something bigger where I can post like this.

the main point of the movie is that companies are offshoring profits to avoid the 35% corporate tax rate, and that so called laws to get the money back in the usa don't create jobs but rather let companies reward the people at the top and cut jobs drastically.

companies including bailout companies from 2001-2011 have over 2.4 trillion dollars off shore. most of that money has 0% taxrate and can never return to the USA, except on 'tax holidays' which generally allow for as little as 5% tax rate. and it is all legal. sick it is so sick. republicans have forced through huge benefit cuts under the notion that america is broke. no americas tax laws are broken, and so are many other places including the uk. http://www.usuncut.org/

n/t

I appear to be in the market for a new KVM as my current one has all but stopped working. Any recommendations? Minimum 4 outputs. *Must* do VGA. My current one has mini-DIN for keyboard and mouse, which has sort of worked some of the time with USB-PS2 converters. I could probably go for a full USB only one, but I'd need to get new cables.

If I were the Ukraine, I'd sink my ships and block the Russian port right now.

Better than surrendering and there's nothing the Russians can do after that. The port becomes disabled for months.

Just ask the Japanese.

not really, i dived into dogecoin. but with my hardware i was able to mine 1,000 dogecoins a day which is worth $1.76 as of last refresh. roughly $50 a month with only the electric bill to pay its nice, but i decided the risk is worth investment. i don't quite trust 'asic' devices as the people making a scrypt based asic would almost certainly be making more profit mining new scrypt coins than selling asic for miners. at least until parts start going bad, then it's time to dump them on the market and let the buyers be jipped thinking they had a decent miner.
my current rigs do 170/khash but i just dropped $400 on a gpu that should do 600-800 khash on dogecoin the former is at my 2.2 days a total of 1700 dogecoins, which is as well as a 5ghash asic for bitcoin. mining bitcoin no longer makes sense(unless you have asic and are desperately trying to recoup your investment). oh and i get a nice free game to go with the new gpu. my power supply and motherboard are can do quad gpu, depending on how the initial gpu does i may buy a second and possibly a third. for legal reasons this is all part of my dad's small business. even though my computers are being run to do the work. as i am the only one with decent gpus. you may have heard of max coin so have i, but seeing the mining going on i'd say asic for maxcoin is highly likely. because math is hard and quality information on which exchanges to mine for maximum profit (they can all be converted once they are in your wallet) i am so far sticking with dogecoin.

Next week my wife is in Antalya for a conference. The day after she gets back I fly to Manila. I start by going backwards - which I usually try to avoid but it was impossible this time. I go to Amsterdam, then to Tapei and finally I will arrive in Manila. The upside, I guess, is that Schipol is a nice airport. Not as nice as Munich International, but nice.
 
My schedule there is 3 days of meetings, a day off and 3 more days of meetings. The day off we are touring Corregidor and I'm really looking forward to that. I've been to PI quite a few times back in the day when I was a trusty shellback and what not. I flew into Manila when I was just out of boot and on my way to my first command. Didn't really see any of the city though. We arrived late at night and they put us on a bus out to Subic. Should be nice. Nice and hot anyway. I'll be going from highs around 10 (admittedly warm for this time of year) to highs around 30. Between that and the humidity I'm gonna be looking forward to getting home as far as the weather goes. A little practice for when we are in Phoenix this summer.
 
After I get back from Manila I'm home for a few weeks and then I head back to Moscow. I come back from there to Hungary but instead of going home I'll be working at a conference in VisegrÃd. I'm giving presentations on some new mobile tools that we are rolling out this year. It's a nice place but I'll be glad when that is done and I'm back home in my own bed. My sweet, sweet American king size bed that sits up on a frame and box springs. I do love Europe so much but not the beds as often.
 
I've heard - just heard - that there is a way as an American to get a 3 year, multiple entry tourist visa for Russia. I'll be looking into that this summer. That's the only pain to going. Wizzair makes Moscow close and cheap. It's getting the visa that makes it a hassle. I get a visa like that I could just about pop over there whenever the mood hit me. When I wrap up the stuff I'm doing at the Moscow office I really want to get up to our office in St. Petersburg.
 
I finished up the Coursera Android course and I pick up my new Macbook pro when I'm in Manila. Then I'll start working on learning iOS development.
 
Oh - that brings me around to an interesting and tech related thing. I have enjoyed using Android Studio which is built on JetBrains stuff. And last year-ish (2012 maybe even?) I bought licenses for some of there stuff when they did this crazy sale. I'm looking at doing a lot more dev myself - html/js/css stuff, java, php - all kinds of junk. So I figured I'd see about just renewing the license on IntelliJ. The problem is their options just didn't work for me. $100 to renew a personal license is a little steep. I could reimburse it but then it's a commercial license and that's triple. They have a free license for FOSS projects but honestly while I slap open licenses on the stuff I do, none of it meets their criteria for community involvement. I'm not a student either. So I'll be going with other options. Maybe Eclipse

Hey, Slashdot was instrumental in finding Twue Wuv for me, so I couldn't possibly leave it forever. The 14 day comment limit, however, is unfortunate for those of us who stop by only every 6-9 months. :^)

I have read your updates and am interested in your lives and would love to leave a comment expressing as much.

So, hey, Red5, congratulations on the marriage and baby and stuff! And all the other babies that have happened in the past 5 years or so for everybody else! And marriages! And diplomas! And new jobs! And sorry/congrats about the divorces!

When we moved to Hungary we had to buy appliances as Europeans believe in big power. And I wouldn't want to have shipped stuff like that anyway. We bought a refrigerator from Bosch because we figured it would be high quality.
 
The compressor on it died the 28th of December. We called out a guy and he informed us that he could replace it for about $250 or we could have it done under warranty. We thanked him and called the warranty people. They came out and told us it would take a week to get the new part. That week turned into two. Finally a guy came out to install it. We were done.
 
That night it died. I think he put it in wrong but I'm not sure. Either way I had to call them back out. They new guy that came said the new compressor was "kaput" and that it would take a week to get one. That was last Tuesday. They are supposed to come put it in tomorrow. So we are coming up on real close to a month.
 
I don't think I'll be buying one of their products again after this.

I started a project to do my homework for the week in the Android class I'm taking. I've been doing the bulk of my work on a desktop machine in my office. This week-end I also set up a dev environment on my Fedora laptop at home. I don't want to have to monkey with copying files and carrying them back and forth so today I set up a GitHub repo so that I could use it to keep things in sync.

I'm no git expert. In the past what I've done is create a project in github with a couple pieces in place. Then I pull that down to a directory on my machine, add the files I need and then push all that back up.

Today I took a little bit of a different approach. I created the project. Then in bash I went to the root directory of the project and set things up. It took me a minute to get it all figured out. The git reference on remotes was a huge help. There is also the JetBrains documentation on git with IntelliJ which is what Android studio is built on.

For my own reference - once I got the project built I needed to add everything. First I went to github and made a repo - but I made it empty, not like I usually do. Then I went to the root of my project in bash.

git add .

and then make an initial commit

git commit -m 'initial commit'

I set up the remote

git remote add origin https://github.com/bittercode/learnandplay.git (bittercode is my github user name and learnandplay is the name of the repo I set up.)

Then I pushed the code to the remote

git push -u origin master

And that put it all up at github. Now I should be able to go home and pull it all down there. I also set up AndroidStudio so that it now handles all the git stuff. When I created a new activity it asked me about adding them to git - so I just said that it should default to yes and now I'm on the fast track to happy days.

Almost all the coding I've done in the last couple years or so was in Python.

I finished my first homework assignment for my Android class and started the second. The first required zero programming and the only files I edited were xml. For the second assignment I'm doing something a little more ambitious and actually writing a little Java. Stinking semicolons. I keep forgetting those little buggers.

I mentioned the IDE thing - holy cow have they gotten more useful. When I want to use some library I just start typing in what I want in the code and a quick keystroke automagically adds the import. Good gravy. The UI editor - if I add a hard coded string - a couple mouse clicks and it generates the necessary entry in the strings.xml file for me. I don't even have to go look at it. It's weird. It takes me back to my old VB 6.0 days.

On the up side with the semicolon - at least I use a US keyboard. On the Hungarian keyboard it requires using ctrl+alt along with another key.

I wrote yesterday about my issues with Android Studio and that I was using Eclipse instead. I wrote too quickly.

Apparently there are some bugs with Eclplise, ADT and Fedora 20 maybe KDE is a part of it too. Anyway I can't keep it going and Eclipse crashes regularly and quickly. This made me go back and look at my issue with Android Studio. An error in the text I used for a text box on one of my layouts was the issue behind it locking up. I had to run the app from the console to figure this out and then fixed the text with Kate and I'm back in gear.

I started the class late so I've been playing catchup. So I don't have time to dig any deeper right now on the Eclipse issues. I've got the first little app mostly done and now I'm working on the second. They are due in five days. After that if I have time I'll keep poking at Eclipse to see if I can find the issue.